


Knots in Ribbon

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Low Chaos (Dishonored)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 01:51:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghosts are singing in the Hound Pits' walls, and from the window the Wrenhaven looks like glass. Callista uses the last of her blank audiographs to send a message to her uncle- and herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knots in Ribbon

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for the lovely [Callista-Curnow](http://callista-curnow.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr.

"Hello Uncle Curnow. It's been a while since we last talked. Too long. I've decided to discount those times at your grave; they weren't really about us, were they? The flowers and the tears. People start worrying if you don't follow the forms, and we're hardly in need of something new to worry about. They've crowned a new Empress, and she looks so small on her throne...her feet hardly touch the ground. Everyone brings her their problems and she always looks so solemn when she tells them she'll fix it all. I wonder if she really believes it. I don't see very much of her these days."

 

The audiograph player clicks its way to a halt, whirring an underscore to the tower's irregular creaks. How Emily used to protest about the noise! It was always worst when she wished to sleep, at least until she agreed to imagine herself in the cramped confines of a cabin aboard some dreamed-up pirate ship. One of Callista's more brilliant suggestions, though it went a long way towards undoing her best efforts to tame the girl's wilder side.

 

Well, let someone else take care of _that_ particular task, now the lively little girl is Empress of the Isles. Someone with nothing on their mind but the teaching. She was never at her best with children, and no child of decent upbringing ought to be educated at a stained pub table with a limited supply of books and strict rationing on her supplies of paper.

 

She takes another audiograph from the dwindling pile at her feet, and replaces the used with the fresh. It clicks into place, and Callista begins anew.

 

"Dear Uncle, you wouldn't believe the week I've had even if you were here to suffer my complaints in person. It's true that I'm no longer Emily's- Empress Emily's sole tutor, but I am doing my best to make myself useful around Dunwall Tower in any way I can. With everything so uncertain and the Empress so very young, it's hard to find a smiling face in the draughty halls. I yearn for laughter. Can you believe it? You always called me solitary, at least compared to the cousins, but here I am, wishing for a smile or two. I wish-" but the audiograph is out of room already, and what she might have wished is lost for good, swept out of the open window on the back of a gentle breeze.

 

Tugging the blanket a little more snugly over her legs, Callista briefly considers moving to a different corner of the room, maybe to sit on one of the musty beds with their gently protesting mattresses and constant damp feel. In the end, it's easier to stay. The pile of unused audiographs is almost gone.

 

Another. "I'm lonely of late, Uncle Curnow. And I suppose I could be lonely in my room at the Tower, which is almost as bare as this one anyway, but it wouldn't be quite the same. The Wrenhaven is like a mirror from this window; I don't know if you ever noticed, but there are so few ships on it these days that it seems to be made of glass. I almost feel I could go and rest my hand upon its surface, and find it unyielding. But I know that's not the case."

 

The audiographs clicks into stillness, and off to her left the door clicks timidly open.

 

"Hello?" someone calls in shaky tones, and Callista freezes in place on her chair. She didn't come unarmed (what would Uncle Geoff have to say about that?) but her pistol sits in the holster she discarded when she sat down, just out of reach.

 

The voice is familiar though, as is the charcoal grey hat perched neatly atop tidy copper hair. Cecelia is as pale as she was when Callista last saw her, the shadows a little more pronounced over too-prominent cheekbones. Her eyes still dart around restlessly, pausing on the window, the second door, the space under Emily's old bed, before resting at last on Callista herself.

 

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. It's just that I was coming in to clean when I heard you talking, and bursting in seemed rude-"

 

"You heard?" All those reprimands she gave to Emily for interrupting others when she ought to listen; maybe it's best that the girl has other teachers now, when Callista is so unfit for polite company. "Forgive me. I just- I thought there was nobody here."

 

Cecelia leans her broom in the doorway, and her bucket and scrubbing brush nearby. If the weight was a bother to her, she doesn't show it. "I came back after you all left," she says, clasping her hands in front of her. "After they took Lydia and Wallace away. Didn't look like the pub was going to be in use for a while, and I know I couldn't actually run the place without Lydia there to help, but I have nowhere else to go. I've been cleaning all the rooms just in case, but even Samuel hasn't come back."

 

"Only me."

 

"I thought you'd all forgotten about me." Cecelia's tentative smile makes a brief appearance, as it used to do on those occasions Callista thanked her for her work, or asked her about her day. Too quickly, and she never stayed to listen long enough. She should have. She shouldn't have forgotten.

 

"Forgive me, I... I suppose I thought you'd fled." A poor excuse; Callista thinks of Cecelia alone in the Hound Pits' derelict rooms with her scrubbing brush, and wonders if she can honestly say her own time has been any better spent. "I only came back for these."

 

Cecelia shrugs the half-truth off like the Wrenhaven's ducks slough river water from their feathers. "It's fine if you want to say you came back to talk to your Uncle. You used to record messages for him, right? I could hear you talking some evenings, when I went walking. Sound travels when it's quiet on the water." She reaches for one of the pillows left scattered across the floor and pauses abruptly. "I don't mean that I was listening in or anything, not at all, I just happened to hear-"

 

"It's fine." And it is, in a way. Those were hollow evenings, shut in her tower while the Loyalists plotted in whispers and she waited for a miracle to deliver her their Empress.  Weepers and rats on the streets and in her dreams, and Uncle Curnow out in the midst of it all. Her messages were fraught with fear and the creaks of an unfamiliar room. And now she knows she wasn't the only one listening. "Can I do anything to help?"

 

"I don't think so." Cecelia picks the pillows up one by one, fluffs them and lays them neatly on the beds. "I can come back later if you need the time. I should probably be thinking about finding a new place to go soon, anyway, where there aren't Weepers in the sewers. And there are too many memories here."

 

"I just miss him so much," Callista doesn't mean to say; the words hang before her, black and bleak, and she can't muster the effort to make them less raw.

 

Cecelia lays the last pillow in place on Emily's bed and brushes it down with neat precision. "I hear Lydia in my dreams at night. Mostly she tells me to stop lazing around and go clean the bar, or make the beds, or get up and start the dough, but not always. Sometimes she sings. I've asked her to stop, but she won't. Guess she can't hear me."

 

Her eyes shine a bit too much. Callista holds her hands out instinctively, reaching for the other woman in the name of something she has no words for, except that it is both offer and request. Cecelia seems to understand; she leaves the pillows as they are and comes to take Callista's gloved hands in her own bare ones, squeezing her fingers tight.

 

They stay that way in silence, until Cecelia's eyes clear and the lump in Callista's throat stops threatening to choke her. From anyone else it might be odd, awkward, but Cecelia is such a mouse of a woman that platitudes would only be an intrusion.

 

Her hands are red and rough-looking, scabbed-over scrapes and healing cuts standing out starkly against Callista's gloves. Someone ought to tell her to stop. Someone ought to sit her down and care for the damage, and then make sure she has gloves of her own. Has she no family?

 

In the end, quiet Cecelia speaks first.

 

"What are you going to do with them now?" She gestures to the table.

 

Callista looks at her little pile of punched-in audiographs; a catalogue of all her fears and doubts, a careful measuring of all her empty spaces. "I hadn't thought. Burn them, I suppose, or bury them. Samuel might take them out to sea and dispose of them if I asked him."

 

Cecelia tugs her hands free and fumbles inside her jacket, digging out a length of fraying string with tattered edges. She must have sawn it open with a blunt knife, whatever it was tied to. Callista thinks of the sailors' knots she spent years perfecting as a girl, tied and untied in her ribbons until she could make and unmake them in the darkness of her more restless nights. She might have helped with this one, if she'd been asked.

 

She takes the string when Cecelia hands it over, offered between calloused fingers like a gift. "Nobody said you had to decide now. I guess you could keep them around while you think about it."

 

"Thank you. I'll do that."

 

"Alright."

 

And she will, once she chooses a knot to tie around her precious bundle that will withstand the journey back to Dunwall Tower. Once the last audiograph carries a message of its own.

 

"Did you want to make one for Lydia?" She offers it to Cecelia, who shakes her head uncertainly.

 

"I'm not sure it would mean much to her; most likely she'd say I had no business using something meant for people like Lord Pendleton. Not to say you shouldn't, not at all, just that it's what she would have said. I'm sorry."

Callista turns away to set the final audiograph in its slot, and then reaches for one of Cecelia's hands again. "You shouldn't stay here. _I_ won't be coming back if I can help it; too many ghosts in the walls. Come to the Tower with me and I'll see there's a space for you wherever you want it. Corvo will remember you, even if Emily doesn't."

 

"I don't want to cause any trouble."

 

"You never have." She was always such a shadow, lurking in corners and watching as others took centre stage and suffered for it. Counting exits and hiding places with her eyes. Always trying to avoid notice, but she was so _happy_ when Callista spoke to her, even if it was as simple as wishing her a good day.

 

Someone ought to see she doesn't scrub the skin from her bones and fade away to nothing. Callista can't sing all that well (and the sailors' songs she painstakingly memorised as a girl make poor lullabies, though she loves them still) but a living voice might be enough to drown out the dead ones. "So many people died or fled that there's no shortage of spare rooms. And it's not hard to make yourself feel useful, when so many things don't get done as it is."

 

Cecelia bites her lip and holds tight to Callista's hand. "I guess if I'm needed, that's okay. Lydia wouldn't mind that."

 

"I expect she'd urge you to go. You could better your situation, and there's always food and elixir for Tower employees. It's the wise thing to do." _And I'm not leaving you here. Uncle Curnow would never forgive me if I did, and I'm not so sure I'd forgive myself._

 

"I don't have much to pack," Cecelia says hesitatingly, as if it might somehow cause Callista to change her mind. "You wouldn't have to wait long, I'll hurry. And I could carry _those_ for you as well."

 

"You have too many burdens of your own to carry mine. We'll manage between us." The whistling wind dies down somewhat, and the building's creaks fade with it. Callista tugs Cecelia closer to the audiograph player and presses the button to start recording.

 

"Hello again, Uncle. I'm going now, but I'll be sure to take care on the streets like you taught me, and I'll avoid dark alleyways as usual. And I won't be alone; you never met Cecelia, but I think you'd have liked her. She's far more sensible than I am." She smiles up at Cecelia, squeezing her hand until she quavers a soft, "Hello Uncle Curnow. I'm- I'm Cecelia."

 

"It won't bite you," Callista says; her voice shakes a little, but it's mirth instead of misery this time. And it's enough encouragement for Cecelia to lean in close and continue.

 

"I'll make sure your Callista gets back home safely, and the rats don't eat her. And I'll make sure _she_ eats properly, and doesn't go wandering off to any more pubs on her own. You can count on me. It's lovely to meet you, sir."

 

"Goodbye, Uncle," Callista says, and just like that the audiograph clicks to a halt for the last time.

 

She bundles up the other audiographs, ties them together with a sailor's knot she last made in one of her mother's discarded hair ribbons, and only half-remembers how to undo. The last audiograph stays separate; she thinks she might want to keep that one, though she's not yet sure why.

 

She'll decipher it someday, but not alone.


End file.
